tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jan 12 23:44:38 2007
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: mu'tlhegh ngajqu'
- From: McArdle <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: mu'tlhegh ngajqu'
- Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:43:17 -0800 (PST)
- Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=X-YMail-OSG:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Message-ID; b=OcWYfaOrqBrxa0J/SFZCN2cQ6ZJkKSgMh2yEPky02GOUHiAEYwO0nnWyhGiPdkAW98oCiwLEX8ksfAzZlzZxQxETAdVv2zUKDbSUZrQRKwwi5j2fS/1WezrYIJi8QFOUse8YNidVX4C1q+mke8ymr0eIKg05G/OiMi0NAPVT+1s=;
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]>
[email protected] wrote:
>In a message dated 1/12/2007 12:28:11 PM Central Standard Time,
>[email protected] writes:
>
>> > They're different in English, of course, but any differences in Klingon
>> are
>> > simply allophones of the same sound, conditioned by the surrounding
>> consonants.
>>
>> But if your point was to use phonemes, that's much different. Instead of
>> having to use just the letter 'a' once, if you wanted a sentence using all
>> the *phonemes* from Klingon, you'd need to use CaC, Caw(') and Cay(')
>> (where C is any consonant) in order to get all the allophones of 'a'.
>> Just pointing out the difference between a letter and a sound. :)
>>
>
>DaH jIyaj.
>
>lay'tel SIvten
But this ignores the definition of "allophone", which is "one of two or more variants of the same phoneme" (Merriam-Webster). That is, by definition you *don't* need to illustrate all the allophones to capture all the phonemes.
For example, in Modern English the phoneme /p/ has two allophones, one of them aspirated (as in "pit") and one unaspirated (as in "spit"). Which allophone is used is dependent on the phonetic surroundings (e.g., a preceding "s" removes the aspiration), but makes no different to meaning. It wouldn't change the meaning of either word in the slightest if you aspirated the /p/ in "spit" or suppressed the aspiration in "pit". In other words, In some other languages this isn't true; in ancient Greek, for example, unaspirated and aspirated [p] were considered distinct sounds and were even spelled with different letters (pi and phi).
If I wanted to write an ancient Greek sentence that contained all possible phonemes, I would have to include a word with pi and one with phi. However, in English these two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme /p/, so either "spit" or "pit" would do to illustrate it; including both would be overkill.
From what I've seen of Klingon, there is a one-to-one mapping of letters (taking, e.g., "tlh" as a "letter") to phonemes. There may or may not be multiple allophones of some of these phonemes depending on their surroundings (e.g., membership in a diphthong), but I don't think we can be sure of that.
Just pointing out the difference between a phoneme and a sound.
mIq'ey
---------------------------------
Looking for earth-friendly autos?
Browse Top Cars by "Green Rating" at Yahoo! Autos' Green Center.